Mar

14

Been traveling a bit in Asia so seeing more billboards in an hour than we have in all of the Virgin Islands. What I noticed is 95% of the ads for upscale clothes, jewelry and such have large photos of models scowling, casting a dour look or an air of haughtiness.

Why is that?

If I was selling clothes I would want my customers to think they might be happy after forking out $300 for a pair of jeans.

Jeff Watson writes:

Talk about dourness, I lived through the grain markets in the 80s, which had a southward gravitational pull for years and years/nobody wanted grains, there was no money in it except for cent and a half trades and the two dollar brokers. Things were so bad that there was no public participation and was a game between only knowledgeable players…..

Just like the state of horse racing today. In the past, the general public (paying too much, selling to cheap and always collecting short, less than true odds even on longshots), would grease the wheels with all that extra cash mostly ending up in the insider's pockets, as always. Back in the old days, 15-20,000 amateurs would regularly take a day off to spend a the races (now you're lucky if 800-1200 show up, all insiders). The insiders would eat the low hanging fruit the public was offering. That low hanging fruit is largely gone, and the game is reduced to just the insiders, the scholarly, and well informed picking each others pockets…… nickel and diming it and devouring each other instead of the schools of bait fish which are largely absent. It's simple ecology 101. As goes for the track, it goes for the markets. I suspect that the Chair could probably expound on this idea 10X better than me (and probably poke enough holes in it to sink the Titanic).